Griffin: Rod doesn't give up without a fight

Published 8:00 pm, Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Maybe the ice rod just fell. Maybe I bumped it. Either way, it tumbled from the rod rack attached to the basement rafters, and grabbing for it, I felt a sensation I could only describe as interesting.

I didn't really feel pain when the hook sunk into the back of my right hand.

But when the rod and reel continued to fall and tugged on the hook - that pain I felt.

The ice fishing jig's lead head was painted in a perch pattern with real googley eyes that now seemed fixed on me. The hook was hung on a wire hook holder just ahead of the rod handle.

The body of the lure was on one side of the holder, my impaled hand on the other. Neither lure nor hand was going to fit through the hook holder. In a sense, I was pop-riveted to the rod and reel.

The point of the hook, meanwhile, was a quarter-inch deep into the meat of my hand - in angling terms, a solid hook-set.

I wiggled and wriggled and wrenched and tried to tug the hook back out. Things quickly got painful, purple and puffy.

I knew vaguely how to use a piece of line to remove a hook, but not one-handed.

(It all felt as awkward as when I knelt on a prickly pear cactus in the Nebraska Sandhills, stapling the plant to my kneecap through the rugged facing panel on the pants. I had to drop my drawers on the prairie and delicately remove a spear at a time.)

I wanted to separate myself from the ice rod and reel. I thought there was room to sneak in the cutting edge of a pair of pliers, without pulling painfully on the hook.

I was wrong.

Side cutters did it, though.

I was free from the rod and reel, but still had a hook shank protruding from my hand and a barbed point within it.

Next, Frye cleaned the site, scowling a bit at the dirty hook (remnants of wax-worm guts from a February outing on Clare County's Sutherland Lake).

He explained that he would poke the hook back out another hole that he would create with the hook point, snip off the point and reverse the process, to avoid pulling the dirt all the way through the wound.

Side cutters worked to cut the hook, I told him.

He doubted there were side cutters in the medical office.

But he did find some heavy toenail clippers. In a couple quick motions, I went from caught to released.

The kind nurse who'd protected me from tetanus told me that using the arm would shorten the recovery time. Casting and retrieving would be ideal, she said.

I liked that better than Doc Frye's advice for the wound: soaking in warm soapy water, perhaps washing dishes.

Two hours later, I was at the Singing Bridge, where the East Branch of the Au Gres River flows into Lake Huron.

The dishes would wait.

And the ice rod? It's going into safer storage. But it didn't give up the winter season without a fight.